Gujarat plans to upgrade old industrial estates

Ahmedabad, May 29 (IANS) Gujarat has prepared a Rs.3,000-crore plan to upgrade the infrastructure of its old industrial estates within the next three years, a minister said Friday. “The government would upgrade infrastructure of all the old industrial estates of Gujarat Industrial Development Corp (GIDC) under its ‘critical infrastructure plan’,” Minister for Energy and Petrochemicals Saurabh Patel said at a function in Moriya, about 25 km from here.

He added that the state government has started identifying sites for setting up new industrial estates during the next three years.

The new estates would be “sector-specific” and the conventional method of allowing any industry to set up units in the estates would be abolished, Patel said.

The government has already identified a site near Ahmedabad for the first phase of the plan to develop a industrial estates.

The state has also embarked on an ambitious plan to provide individual power transformers to farmers under its ‘Khushi Scheme’ (Happy Scheme) to ensure uninterrupted power supply at subsidised rates.

The state government would bear 50 percent of the cost of the transformers, 40 percent would be met by power distribution companies of the Gujarat Electricity Board (GEB) and the remaining 10 percent by farmers.

This apart, all low tension (LT) power connections of the farmers would be converted into high tension (HT) facility, Patel said.

According to him, the plan of offering individual transformers to the farmers would reduce the incidence of power theft from high tension lines in the rural areas.